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Herring Lady Resurgence 


Tlingit Kiks.ádi women of Sitka, Alaska are known as Kaxatjaasháa [Herring Ladies] and are responsible to the Pacific Herring. This reciprocal relationship originates from an oral history of the first woman to call to the Herring with song and dance. Kiks.ádi people have harvested Herring eggs sustainably for millennia, stewarding breeding grounds, and defining kinship relationships to human and more -than-human relatives through embodied practices such as song, dance, observation, harvest, distribution, story-telling, and ceremony. Pacific Herring are a keystone-cultural species which wildlife such as salmon, whales and sea birds depend on. Their critical decline creates a threat to Indigenous ways of life and food webs in the Pacific, acting as a barometer of the effects of climate change and extractive colonial economies. 

 

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